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In this week’s SkepticBlog, I propose a challenge to my readers: find a passage from any ancient text, not just the Bible (although you can use that as well), that appears to match a scientific principle, law, fact, or discovery and then submit your entry as a comment at the end of this post.

Best would be to comb through any ancient myth or tale or story that predates the scientific concept. This will “prove” that the selected text is supernaturally inspired (how else would ancient authors know about the scientific discovery?). For example, in the biblical Book of Job, two passages read as follows:

9:7 Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.

9:8 Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea.

Some believers think that 9:8 means the expanding universe. If so, wouldn’t 9:7 represent a collapsing universe?

But, this challenge is not restricted to the Bible; using any literary source, find passages that seem to match scientific discoveries. Let me explain how this challenge came about…

In my latest column in Scientific American (December) I introduce a concept I call Patternicity, or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Of course, some patterns are real while others are not, and science is the best tool ever devised for discriminating between true and false patterns.

Last Saturday (November 15) I experienced another example of patternicity — in biblical interpretation. I was invited to speak at the Orange County chapter of Hugh Ross’s Reasons to Believe, run by a gentleman named Virgil Robertson. Reasons to Believe is an evangelical organization dedicated to providing believers with, well, reasons to believe, mostly from the pages of science. Ross is an astronomer so he is especially fond of astronomical and cosmological reasons to believe, but they cover all aspects of science when necessary.

To their credit, they invited me to give their members my best shot at providing “reasons not to believe,” which I did in outlining the evidence I present in my book, How We Believe, that God (and the corresponding religions in his name) were created by humans and not vice versa. But in addition to my lecture, Virgil sent me a long list of questions for “skeptics” to answer. I provide the entire set at the end of this document, but right at the top I noticed this one:

1. How do skeptics account for the fact that the Bible (in writings over 2500 years old) teaches concepts consistent with Big Bang cosmology, which were undiscovered until the 20th century? Such as:
   • The continual expansion of the universe and the stretching of the actual space-time fabric of the universe itself (Job 9:8, Isaiah 42:5, 48:13, 40:22, 45:12, 44:24, Jeremiah 51:15, 10:12, Zechariah 12:1)

Wait a minute, I thought. The book of Job is about the expansion of the universe and the fabric of space and time? I thought it was a book about human suffering and the problem of evil. What is this cosmological passage in Job 9:8, I wondered? Here it is:

Job 9:8: “Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea.”

Uh? What’s the context for this? The answer is in the passages that come before:

9:1 Then Job answered and said,
9:2 I know it is so of a truth: but how should man be just with God?
9:3 If he will contend with him, he cannot answer him one of a thousand.
9:4 He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath hardened himself against him, and hath prospered?
9:5 Which removeth the mountains, and they know not: which overturneth them in his anger.
9:6 Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.
9:7 Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.
9:8 Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves of the sea.

This listing is a poetic way of reinforcing to the reader God’s power: Able to move mountains, cause earthquakes, stop the sun, cover the stars, spread out the heavens, and walk on water. It’s a common motif in mythic literature, not unlike…

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look! Up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. Yes, it’s Superman. Strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman — who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights the never ending battle for Truth, Justice and the American Way.

(Do you suppose this theme of a messianic figure coming to earth, mingling among the common people, performing miracles, and righting injustices — repeated in the film The Day the Earth Stood Still by the way — was consciously modeled on the Christ story or that it is simply a common theme among many myths that gets repeated because it makes for a dramatic storyline?)

Now, about that verse 8 and the “spreadeth” of the heavens. The word in Hebrew is “natah.” According to Skeptic magazine Religion Editor Tim Callahan, who helped me to prepare for my religious interlocutors, while it can have a variety of applications, in the context of here it most probably means “spread out,” like a blanket or a tent. In fact, God “spreading” out the sky like a tent or blanket is a metaphor for the dome of the sky or canopy of the fixed stars. (As in Isaiah 40:22, where God stretched the heavens out “like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in.”) The reference is to the “canopy” of fixed stars that stretched over the flat fixed earth in this ancient cosmological model that the Israelites inherited from the Babylonians and Egyptians (see figure below).

What is really going on here with Reasons to Believe is a special form of patternicity of searching for (and finding) meaningful patterns in the Bible that appear to match current scientific thinking. If, for example, new data indicated that we lived in a closed universe and that the universe will eventually collapse, we could find support in Job 9:7: “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.”

So which is it, an expanding universe or a collapsing universe? How can the Bible be used to settle the issue?

Since Tim Callahan was good enough to look up for me a few additional passages provided by Reasons to Believe, let’s review them:

The universe coming into existence at a distinct time in the finite past (Gen. 1:1, Isaiah 42:5, 45:18, Gen. 2:3–4, Heb. 11:3)

Callahan Answer: Taken altogether, all of these verses simply say that God created the world. So what? All religions have origin myths, even Gods who create the world ex nihilo. In a hymn to Ra, ca. 1350 BCE, The Papyrus Hunefer says (Sir Wallis Budge Egyptian Religion, p.49):

Thou art the one god who came into being at the beginning of time. Thou didst create the earth. Thou didst fashion man, thou didst make the watery abyss of the sky, thou didst form the Nile, thou didst create the great deep, and thou dost give life to all that therein is.

This is just one of many Egyptian papyri that greatly antedate the Bible in which a God creates everything out of nothing.

How do skeptics account for the fact that the Bible identifies four initial conditions of the primordial earth, which have all been confirmed by modern science? (Genesis 1:2) Namely that …

• The Earth was Formless (and unfit for life) — (Scientists now tell us that the primordial earth was indeed formless and unfit to support life during the Hadean Era from ~ 4.5 to 3.9 bya).
• The Earth was Void (or empty of life) — (Scientists find no evidence for life on earth prior to 3.9 bya)
• Darkness over the Surface of the Earth
• The Earth’s Surface was Covered with Water

Callahan Answer: Just about every creation story starts out with the world being dark, formless and void. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be creation stories, would they? The Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish, which antedates the Bible, starts out with the world covered with water. Does that make it scientific?

How do skeptics account for the scientific accuracy of the Day-Age interpretation of the Genesis 1 creation account, which documents 10 chronologically ordered creation events that have now been confirmed to be sequentially accurate by modern science?

Callahan Answer: The sequence of creation events in Genesis 1:

1. creation of light,
2. creation of a firmament (Heaven) between the waters,
3. creation of oceans and dry land
4. Creation of vegetation, on land and sea,
5. creation of the sun, moon and stars,
6. Creation of sea animals and birds
7. creation of land animals,
8. creation of human beings.

This does not match the findings of modern science.

How do skeptics account for the multiple examples of fulfilled prophecy found in the Bible?

Callahan Answer: The gospel writers searched the Hebrew Scriptures for prophecies and wrote the gospels to conform to them. We have no objective record of the details of the Crucifixion, and the Gospels, hardly objective, disagree with each other and were definitely not written by eyewitnesses. As to Daniel 9:24–26: It says (v. 26), “an anointed one will be cut off.” This was probably a high priest Antiochus Epiphanes put to death. Christian Bibles often say it the “Messiah” who is referred to. But “Messiah” (Heb. mashiach, Aramaic meshihah) simply means, “anointed.” The succession of empires in Daniel 2 is actually Babylon, Persia, Alexander’s empire and the successor states (the Seleucid empire, Ptolemaic Egypt and Macedonia under the Antigonids). Bear in mind, also that Daniel was written after the fact, ca. 164 BCE.

In other words, this is like being impressed that the Star Wars prequels predict the earlier-made sequels.

After my lecture, the good folks at Reasons to Believe took me out to lunch at a restaurant less than a mile from the big Brea fire that started while we were indoors. When I came out I must confess that for a brief moment I thought that maybe it was the end of days! The skies were darkened and ash rained down upon us, making me think of descending into Dante’s inferno…

A couple of days later, Reasons to Believe sent me a packet of reading materials in support of their claim that it is possible to scientifically test biblical claims. Here is my general response (since the specific responses above seemed not to satisfy):

Virgil,

As for your question, and the general approach you take, you are starting with a built-in assumption that absolutely must be true for you, and that is that the Bible is supernatural (or was supernaturally written or inspired or whatever). That is antithetical to science. There is no way to test that outside of the Bible itself, and thus you find yourself in a tautology: the Bible is supernaturally written, thus everything in it must be true, thus whatever it is that scientists discover must somehow fit with what we already know to be true. 

That is, the facts of science cannot possibly — ever! — contradict scripture. This leads to the torturing of the facts to fit scripture, and vice versa. And thus you end up with these hopelessly twisted interpretations of what some word or phrase “really means” (by which you mean “how can I make this darn thing fit?”) and you thereby miss the larger meaning of the Bible stories.

As for the order in Genesis, it’s wrong:

• Creation of the universe and earth at the same time: wrong (universe is 13.7 by, earth is 4.6 by).
• Earth without form and yet there is water: wrong (water came much later after its formlessness became formed).
• Then light is created: wrong (light from stars came much earlier than the creation of the earth — by billions of years!).
• Creation of day and night (well, that would have happened as soon as the earth began to rotate, which was well before water, so…wrong!).
• Dividing the waters from the firmament (as I said, this is ancient Babylonian/Egyptian canopy cosmology that the Israelites adapted, which was wrong).
• Creation of land and grass and plants and fruit trees on day three before the seasons on day four (wronger than wrong).
• Creation of the moon on the 4th day (wrong, that came way before grass and plants and fruit trees).

In any case, Bible scholars of all stripes (the vast majority of which are as deeply religious as you are and believe all the same central tenets of Christianity that you believe) agree that the Bible is an edited volume written by many authors over a long span of time. This helps explain why, for example, in one passage Noah is instructed to take two of every kind of animal on the Ark, and in another passage he is instructed to take 7 of each kind, two of the unclean (or was it clean?) types. One version has the flood lasting 40 days and 40 nights, another passage says 150 days. In one passage Noah sends out a raven to find land. In another passage he sends a dove. And on and on. You and Hugh and company obviously have encountered these facts about the bible, facts uncovered not by skeptics/atheists but by born-again bible-believing Christians.

By adopting the stance that you do you are forced to dismiss all of this scholarship and, in my opinion, miss the real meaning of the Bible. The Bible is about how people should get along with one another and about morality and ethics and meaning. By trying to make it fit the current estimates of the Hubble constant (to pick just one among many examples), me thinks you are missing the point of the book, and thus (in your world view) you are missing the point God is making.

To quote Oliver Cromwell, speaking before the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Questions for Michael Shermer’s Talk (November 15th, 2008)

Positive Evidence Section

1. How do skeptics account for the fact that the Bible (in writings over 2500 years old) teaches concepts consistent with Big Bang cosmology, which were undiscovered until the 20th century? Such as:
   • The universe coming into existence at a distinct time in the finite past (Gen. 1:1, Isaiah 42:5, 45:18, Gen. 2:3-4, Heb. 11:3)
   • The continual expansion of the universe and the stretching of the actual space-time fabric of the universe itself (Job 9:8, Isaiah 42:5, 48:13, 40:22, 45:12, 44:24, Jeremiah 51:15, 10:12, Zechariah 12:1)
2. How do skeptics account for the fact that the Bible identifies four initial conditions of the primordial earth, which have all been confirmed by modern science? Namely that …
   • The Earth was Formless (and unfit for life) — (Scientists now tell us that the primordial earth was indeed formless and unfit to support life during the Hadean Era from ~ 4.5 to 3.9 bya).
   • The Earth was Void (or empty of life) — (Scientists find no evidence for life on the primordial earth prior to 3.9 bya)
   • Darkness over the Surface of the Earth — (Scientists now know that a heavy atmosphere impenetrable to light initially blanketed the primordial Earth prior to the moon-forming collision ~ 4.496 bya)
   • The Earth’s Surface was Covered with Water — (Scientists now know that the primordial earth was indeed covered with water from ~ 3.9 to 3.1 bya) (Genesis 1:2)
3. How do skeptics account for the scientific accuracy of the Day-Age interpretation of the Genesis 1 creation account, which documents 10 chronologically ordered creation events that have now been confirmed to be sequentially accurate by modern science?

   Supernatural Scientific Accuracy of Genesis 1 … 10 Creation Events

   The first creation event recorded in Genesis 1 is…

   The Creation of the entire Physical Universe (including all matter, energy and spatio-temporal dimensions) … Scientists tell us this Big Bang cosmic creation event occurred ~ 13.7 bya (Gen. 1:1, In the beginning)

   Creation Event #2

   The appearance of light - Transformation of Earth’s Early Atmosphere from Opaque to Translucent … Scientists tell us this event occurred via the moon forming collision experienced by earth ~ 4.496 bya. (Gen. 1:3–4, Day 1)

   Creation Event #3

   The Formation of a Stable Water Cycle … Geologists tell us that a stable planetary water cycle was established between ~ 3.9 and 3.1 bya. (Gen. 1:6–7, Day 2)

   Creation Event #4

   The Formation of Continental Land Masses … Scientists now estimate that the first continental land masses emerged above sea level ~ 3.0 bya. (Gen. 1:9–10, Day 3)

   Creation Event #5

   The Production of Land Plants … Paleobiologists now believe that land plants first appeared on earth between ~ 750 (molecular clock) and 450 (fossils) mya. (Gen. 1:11–12, Day 3)

   Creation Event #6

   The appearance of the sun, moon and stars - The Transformation of the Earth’s Atmosphere from Perpetually Translucent to Occasionally Transparent … Scientists tell us the sun, moon, stars and planets first “appeared” as visibly distinct objects in the sky … between ~ 600 and 540 mya. (Gen. 1:14–17, Day 4)

   Creation Event #7

   The Production of Swarms of Small Sea Animals … The first evidence for large populations of small sea animals and fish appear in the fossil record between ~ 550 and 400 mya. (Gen. 1:20, Day 5)

   Creation Event #8

   The Production of Birds and Sea Mammals … Paleontologists have discovered the first evidence for birds in the fossil record appears ~ 160 mya. And the first evidence for sea mammals appears ~ 55 mya. (Gen. 1:20–21, Day 5)

   Creation Event #9

   The Production of Three Specialized Types of Land Mammals … Mammals designed to cohabitate with humans … Scientists tell us that dogs, cats, rodents, and domesticatable livestock species first appear in the fossil record at varying times throughout the last 50 million years. (Gen. 1:24–25, Day 6)

   Creation Event #10

   The Production of the Human species … Paleoanthropologists now know that anatomically modern Homo sapiens first appear in the fossil record between ~ 150 and 40 kya. (Gen. 1:26–27, Day 6)

   It’s important to note that the book of Genesis was written in ~1,400 B.C.E. — long before the advent of modern science. The scientific accuracy of the Genesis 1 creation account provides strong evidence for its supernatural origin. If the Bible did not have a supernatural origin, how do we account for its uncanny precision, in light of a growing collection of modern scientific confirmations?

4. How do skeptics account for the multiple examples of fulfilled prophecy found in the Bible?

Messianic Prophecies:

• The specifics of Jesus’ Ancestral Lineage … Gen 22:12, 12:2-3, 21:12, 35:10-12, 49:10, Micah 5:12, Numbers 24:12, Isaiah 11:1, 1:10, Jeremiah 23:5
• The Place of His Birth … Micah 5:2
• The fact that His Hands and Feet were Pierced … Psalm 22:16, Zech 12:10
• The fact that He had no Broken Bones in His Body at the time of death (an unusual occurrence for Roman crucifixions) … Psalm 34:20
• The fact that His Garments were Divided and Lots were Cast for Them … Psalm 22:18
• And the fact that He was buried in the Tomb of a Rich Man … Isaiah 53:9

Daniel’s Prophecies:

• The date of Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem and subsequent execution … Daniel 9:24–26
• The succession of World Empires: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece & Rome … Daniel 2:37–42

Prophecies About the Nation of Israel:

• The establishment of Israel as a nation and their return to the land (in 1948) … The 2nd regathering — Isaiah 11:11, Jeremiah 29:14, Ezekiel 36:24, 28, 36.